


Damage Control

by distractionpie



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Office, First Meetings, Fox is Done, M/M, Palpatine is an asshole boss, Pre-relationship/flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:28:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26108707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: Fox has enough problems without a collision in a elevator with quite possibly the worst excuse for a CEO he's ever seen.
Relationships: CC-1010 | Fox/Quinlan Vos
Comments: 21
Kudos: 111





	Damage Control

Fox hasn’t committed murder.

But it’s only ten fifteen am.

He doesn’t have any meetings on the calendar until one. As long as he keeps answering emails while disposing of any bodies, there’s absolutely nothing stopping him.

The list of potential candidates is long, but right now there’s a clear front runner in the stranger who didn’t know to wait for people exiting before trying to board an elevator and had therefore crashed directly into Fox.

Not a single drop of the coffee Fox is carrying has spilled, he is a goddamn expert, but the same can’t be said for the papers the man who’d collided with him had been carrying.

They’re everywhere.

Half in, half out of the elevator; several are slipping down the gap into the shaft, and a single sheet had managed to catch an air conditioning current and is now gusting down the hallway.

None of this is directly Fox’s problem. But everything that happens in this building becomes his problem, one way or another, and if he left events to unfold the situation would likely be worse by the time it was brought to him.

He takes a long look at the stranger.

He has a visitor's pass clipped to his belt, but this is an executive floor. Still three away from anybody truly important, but several too high for just anyone to be wandering around unsupervised.

“Are you looking for somebody?” he asks, tersely. Whoever let their visitor wander around unsupervised was going to get harsh words from him later, but that wasn’t something to be let slip around outsiders, even Palpatine bit back his vicious temper until the office doors closed on any visitors.

“I have a chat scheduled with the bossman at elevenish,” the wanderer says casually, as if Fox would ever tolerate a meeting on the company schedule at eleven _ish_. “Figured I’d head on up and scope the place out.”

“ _You’re_ meeting with Mr Palpatine?” Fox couldn’t keep the doubt out of his voice. This man didn’t seem like he belonged in a meeting with their marketing team, who were permitted very slight degrees of deviation for image purposes, let alone in the presence of the disdainful corporate president. 

“Quinlan Vos,” the stranger introduces, holding out a hand. “Founder and C.E.O. of Psymetry Enterprises”

Fox ignores the hand. Fox ignores everything except the alarm klaxons going off in his head.

Psymetry Enterprises. Palpatine’s eleven o’clock investment pitch meeting. Which will impact his mood for the whole afternoon. Is a man who’s presentation materials are in a paper binder. A man who just dropped that binder all over the elevator. One of the sheets Fox can see shows a graph which appears to have been drawn freehand with marker.

Vos is wearing a _h_ _awaiian shirt_.

“Where are your _sleeves_?” Fox demands. “This is a professional environment.”

Vos grins. “It’s what everybody who is anybody is doing these days: when you’re the real deal success speaks for itself.”

“Not when meeting with Mr. Palpatine,” Fox says. Surely researching Palpatine and digging up just how conservative his sensibilities are should have been basic preparation for a meeting like this? Even if Vos is the type to go for that rubbish, somebody else involved in this pitch should have had more sense. “Where’s your assistant?”

Vos rolls his eyes. “I don’t have one. I can set memos for appointments for myself.”

“You... don’t have one?”

Quinlan Vos, C.E.O of the rapidly expanding Psymetry Enterprises, who have taken the global market with such storm that Palpatine is meeting them to talk investment after less than a year in operation, doesn’t have an assistant. Who writes up his minutes? Who screens his calls? Who ensures he arrives places on time? After all, it’s quite clear the man can’t organise himself. Let alone the executive administration for a growing international business.

Vos opens his mouth, but Fox shakes his head. “No,” he decides. “I don’t even want to know.”

Vos doesn’t stand a chance. There’s nothing Fox can do that will keep Palpatine from despising him on sight, but with enough damage control he might be able to keep the man from being in an excessively foul mood for the rest of the day.

And as Palpatine’s primary personal assistant, Fox always ends up on the receiving end of his temper.

“Follow me,” he orders, abandoning the last of the papers. If there’s confidential information on them, Vos should have been more careful not to drop them everywhere in the first place. And he doesn’t need them for meeting with Palpatine, because it will do him no favours to go into the man’s office with an armful of loose-leaf.

He doesn’t wait to see if Vos is obeying. If the man isn’t smart enough to, then things are unsalvageable anyway.

One empty hallway later, a discreet grey door, and...

“This...” Vos sounds bemused but not protesting, “is a supply closet.”

Yes. And Fox keeps it well supplied.

“Shirt off,” he orders, dragging a storage box down from where it’s tucked discreetly behind several boxes of copy paper. “Put these on.”

He pulls his cellphone from his jacket, calling up the details of the meeting. Eleven am, forty-five minute slot, no catering. So Palpatine doesn’t want what Vos does badly enough that he might feign tolerance for some eccentricity, but nor is he indifferent enough that the whole thing might be dismissed. Wonderful. Fox is going to be calling the IT department to replace smashed equipment before the day is out. He can feel it.

At the sound of a cleared throat, he tucks his phone away and looks back at Vos.

The loaned shirt is a far more professional white Oxford, but it’s not as much help as he’d hoped, the seams are straining around Vos’s biceps, blatantly borrowed -- Fox’s emergency kit is for particularly stupid interns who can’t managed to keep their shirts clean all day and they tended to be built scrawnier than Vos. As for the tie...

“Urgh.” Stepping forward, Fox pulls apart the skinny, school-boyish knot, adjusting Vos’s collar so he can re-tie it in a much more respectable four-in-hand.

He looks Vos up and down. Slowly.

The shoes are tolerable. His trousers aren’t well cut but they still fit him better than the ones in the emergency kit would. The shirt is as good as it’s going to get. Gold cufflinks would suit him far better than silver given the tattoos, but they’re a step up from no cufflinks. His jacket is respectable if unflattering. The lack of a watch is annoying, but at least there’s no tan-line to draw attention to it. The tie is perfect. Vos’s smirk...

“You’ll do,” Fox decides, with two abrupt steps back that have his shoulders pressing into the shelves. 

“You know, this isn’t what usually happens when somebody pulls me into a closet and tells me to take my clothes off,” Vos says, and then tweaks the tie until it’s crooked. “But I’m finding the novelty quite exciting.”

“Excitement isn’t usually what people are looking for when preparing for an investor meeting.”

Vos shrugs. “The meeting is to suss out just how interested he is in us and if he might go to the competition,” he says. “We certainly don’t need him.”

He must be very confident of that indeed, to share the information so casually with an employee of the investment firm he’s scoping out.

A theory that’s confirmed when Vos follows his words by pulling a sheet of paper from one of the packets on the shelves, and then leans over and steals one of the pens right out of Fox’s front pocket, tongue peeking out between his lips as he writes, and then offers both the paper and pen back to Fox.

 _Quinlan!_ it reads, in an obnoxiously large looping scrawl, followed by a succession of digits that is clearly a cellphone number.

Fox has seen far too much to gape, but, “Do you... not have a business card?”

Vos laughs, warm and rich and filling up the cramped grey space of the storage closet. “That’s for business,” he says, wiggling the paper between them. “This is pleasure. Not that it doesn’t seem like you’d be excellent at both, but nobody is excellent enough to justify the brutality of the murder a whole list of people would inflict on me if I combined the two.”

At least one way in which Fox can’t disapprove of Vos being the antithesis of Palpatine’s usual associates. He takes the pen. 

“No?” Vos pouts, and lets the paper fall to the floor. “Shame. Still, I’d best get going. Wouldn’t want all your effort to go to waste.”

He winks, and then all but sashays out of the closet.

Fox watches him go, and then leans up against the shelves and counts to ten. It doesn’t help. He’s not sure there’s a number high enough for that.

Then he leans down and picks up the paper.

After all, it wouldn’t do for anybody else to find it there.


End file.
